The postings on this site solely reflect the personal views of each author and do not necessarily represent the views, positions, strategies or opinions of IBM or IBM management. IBM reserves the right to remove content deemed inappropriate.

Night At The Intelligent Building Management*

While most of what I know about art preservation I learned from watching Ghostbusters II, I do know that it is a difficult task. Art needs to be viewed/shared with it's audience and yet must be properly preserved so that it is not irreparably damaged and lost to future viewers.

Years of reading comic books has taught me that ink/paper tend to deteriorate at a rapid rate. It is very rare to find "Golden Age" comic books in pristine condition, and comic books only go as far back as the 1930's. So you can imagine what a difficult task museums have with paint/canvas that dates back into the hundreds (and even thousands) of years. Museum visitors line up every day to see these paintings. Up close and personal.

Art, like so many things, is stored in buildings and it is the environment of these buildings which must be regulated and controlled so as to properly preserve the art.

Which is why one of the coolest things to come out of our Smarter Buildings event on June 9th was how IBM is partnering with, "...Metropolitan Museum of Art to test a wireless environmental sensor network--dubbed, unsexily, the Low-Power Mote--in the museum's Cloisters, a section that holds 3,000 works of art from medieval Europe. The works, which include paintings, tapestries, and illuminated manuscripts, date from the 12th through the 15th century." (Fast Company).

Buildings are essential to a Smarter Planet and it's one of the areas we're focusing on with our industry solutions.

Using buildings to help preserve the art that they house is one way that our customers are leveraging Intelligent Building Management solutions, but we also had another great customer at this event.

Tulane University is another customer with whom we are partnering, and they are certainly at the forefront of helping to create a Smarter Planet with ...[their] first IBM project is helping to transform the home of Tulane's School of Architecture, the century-old Richardson Memorial Hall, into a "smarter building living laboratory," using IBM Intelligent Building Management while maintaining respect for its historic status. The school aims to arm a new generation of architects with techniques that will allow historic buildings to be more efficiently adapted for modern use.

Please comment below. Are you and your company working towards intelligent building management? Have you been following any projects similar to Tulane and the MET that you want to share with the community?

*yes, "Intelligent Building Management At The Museum" would have made more sense, but when have I ever bothered to make sense?